Aesthetics and Physicality

To heal someone, it pays to know truly the intricate ways to hurt someone.

This process may have started with my systematic dismemberment of game for the table, the weekly foraging from age ten on into the white birch and pin oak, gypsy moth-infested young forest adjacent to abandoned farmland. I was the go-to kid every fall for the butchering of the white tail deer catch of the neighborhood and hunting partners of my father.

I was then reading of the surgeons of the Civil War and their ability to remove the mutilated appendages quickly due to their intimate knowledge of human anatomy, not by the primitive tools or lack of disinfectant. I went on to train weekly by osmosis with the great chiropractor, Lou Savas, in his recently sold brownstone on the upper west side of Manhattan island in my quest to stay repaired to grow as a fighter, while dating ballerinas, girls who also knew their bodies. I went on to teach a physical anatomy course and foundation drawing for ten years at the School of Visual Arts, and at my then-famous gym, Madison Avenue Muscle, on East 38th Street.

I cannot separate out part of my passion from the total. The spirit lives in the doing and the perfectionism of the task, regardless of the amount of pure physicality or mental focus needed.

I find my application of aesthetics within everything, a totally Shinto perspective. Becoming one of Gene LeBell’s original four black belts taught me even more about the separation of ligament, tendon, and bone from the wearer. I enjoyed the process.

Repairing others and myself was a specialty early on, and mother referred to me as "Doctor Quack, operating without a license." I immersed myself in nutrition and supplementation geared towards athletic performance enhancement and had hundreds of clients.

As General Patton said about what he loved most in life, "Fucking and fighting."